Paper's abstract

Pierre Caye, The beautiful property. Palladian architecture and right of ownership
The right of ownership hangs neither from a initial contract of sharing, nor from the demiurgical transformation of world by man, but only from what Thomas Aquinas called a superadditio rationis. During the humanist and classical age, the task to overbuild the world trough reason and thereby to legitimate the right to ownership of men regarding metaphysics rests on the shoulders of Architecture. We intend to show how architecture, and in particular the palladian architecture, forms a technical and scientific device which, through its regulated art of eurythmics as well as through the moral and aesthetic experience it creates, tends to favour and sustain the appropriation, subjective as well as objective, of the world by man.

Key Words : architecture, Palladio, property, Thomas Aquinas, appropriation
t. 40, 1995 : p. 158-171

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